Five best books about one-term presidents

John Steele Gordon is the author of Hamilton's Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt (revised edition, 2010).

For the Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of books about one term presidents, including:

Chester Alan Arthur
by Zachary Karabell (2004)

Except for Abraham Lincoln, presidents in second half of the 19th century were a forgettable bunch, none more so than Chester Arthur, who never even aspired to the office. As Zachary Karabell notes in his concise but evocative biography, Arthur—a New York lawyer and Republican patronage politician—became the vice-presidential nominee in 1880 only to balance the ticket with James Garfield in a badly fractured convention. Then, just six months into Garfield's term, an assassin's bullet (and bungling doctors) put Arthur in the White House. Though he had risen on the wings of patronage and had been a defender of the spoils system, he forced through the Pendleton Act, which began the transformation of the politically corrupt federal bureaucracy into the modern civil service. His furious former allies denied him nomination to a full term in 1884, but even Mark Twain, no friend of politicians, thought Arthur had been a good president.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue